My great-grandmother Nettie Wilhemina Kummer loomed large in my girlhood, despite her passing when I was only a baby. My great-grandmother was a tiny woman – less than five feet tall – but the stories of her life filled me with wonder and with the assurance that women are strong and powerful and capable of so much more than people think. Nettie married Chancey Noble when she was just a teenager and moved away from her native Illinois to homestead in Montana while her husband worked on the railroad. Not long into their marriage, her husband died and Grandma Nettie ended up raising three small children alone in a rustic cabin. As she waited, so as to be able to claim the cabin and not leave her marriage empty handed, she faced wild animals, brutal winters, grew her own food and raised cattle and horses.

Grandma Nettie eventually remarried and faced and conquered loads of challenges – raising seven kids in the Depression, rescuing animals like mink form local farms, and carving out beauty in her garden that she planted by scavenging plants from roadsides. But her story has always inspired me and the rest of our family. She was wild and free and sometimes hard, because the world made her be that way to survive. But as a girl, she was a heroine who overcame so much, including gender discrimination and poverty. There’s been a string of strong women in my family – women who worked hard, faced tragedy and cared for those they loved – and I think Nettie was a role model to lots of us.

Growing up in the 1980s, TV and movies told me that girls were soft and needed to be taken care of, but women like my grandmother were strong and determined and achieved so much more than society told them they could. Women like my Grandma Nettie don’t have Wikipedia pages or even show up in search histories online, but they laid the groundwork for future generations.

– Dr Jen Almjeld